voila a-z: k is for knowledge

One of the great features of Voila is that it generates suggestions for users to assist with content discovery. Whilst this functionality is obviously great, it wouldn’t be possible without some foreknowledge of the user to help make sure the suggestions are going to be useful for them and not just a nuisance. Here’s a few bits of knowledge that Voila retains to aid its purpose.

knowledge is power

Voila stores information that gets sent to it to improve user experience for users. Here’s a couple of things that can be logged and why…

actions: making note of what content a user has interacted with can give the system a good idea of what they’re interested in, making it easier to serve better content suggestions.

buzz: keeping record of ‘actions’ makes it easy to see what’s popular at any time; if a lot of people are checking out the same content, we can then recommend it to others who might be interested.

highlighted content: panels allow users to store specific TV shows, events and categories that can help to generate better suggestions.

positions: having to remember what point you got up to in a TV show can be a pain. That’s why having Voila store the information is a win. The positions endpoint makes it easy to store and retrieve information on where users have got up to in as many shows as they might be watching.

There’s no blog post on the positions endpoint just yet, so stay tuned — we’ve got a couple of letters to go before we’re there… 🙂

but wait, there’s more!

Voila not only benefits from knowledge of users, but also knowledge from Atlas. When Voila generates suggestions, it can also fetch the metadata for its results from Atlas making it easy to include descriptions and images to draw users in. Ultimately, we only want to suggest content that the user is likely to enjoy, but an exciting image and a vivid description obviously never hurts!

kebab

Try using Voila to see to see how easy it is to benefit from its knowledge as well as that of Atlas. Make sure you let us know how it goes by shooting us any comments using the box below or on Twitter!

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